Monday, February 2, 2009

Perfecting and Sending The Sparks

There have been several studies showing that spirituality improves health and healing. Spirituality influences your world view, your day to day living and your way of Being. Spirituality is a personal quest for discovering the answers to the ultimate questions about life and relationship to the Sacred. Through Spirituality you find meaning, hope, comfort and inner peace.

Spiritual Wellness is the quest for meaning, value, and purpose resulting in hope, joy, courage, and gratitude. It is the ability to find peace and balance in our lives as our values and ethics match our actions. Spiritual Wellness involves evaluation of personal beliefs and learning to trust intuition.

Spiritual Wellness helps us to realize that that we do not have to suffer to evolve as long as we understand that the seeds to Enlightenment exist in each day's experiences. As we apply these lessons to our spiritual evolution, we learn to control our thoughts and our reality and the health and well being of our body, mind and spirit.

We learn to recognize how our intentions project thoughts into reality. As we become conscious of self-defeating thoughts, we can acknowledge them and replace them with positive affirmations.

We are at peace as the Great Mystery is no longer mysterious. We live in harmony, with humility, compassion, and a willingness to surrender to the will of the Great Spirit. When we look at our lives, we usually assess them in weeks, months, and years, but yet, in truth, we are meant to focus on days.

Kabbalists teach that a person is given a certain number of days to live. Within each day there is a spark of Light that one is meant to perfect. The totality of all the work that is done in any given day, from restricting anger to sharing, goes into the perfection of the spark of Light for that day.

In the Bible, people lived for hundreds of years, but then life expectancy dropped. The Kabbalists explain this with a parable.

There was once a King who owned a diamond mine. After extracting the diamonds, he would give thousands of them at a time to local craftsmen, whose job was to clean and perfect the stones over several months time. The only problem was that they never completed the work. In fact, some of the diamonds came back damaged. Therefore, the King set up a new method by which he gave each craftsman fewer diamonds and less time to get the job done.

The same happened with humanity.

Initially, the Creator gave each person millions of sparks of Light, one corresponding to each day of life they were given. But although people lived for hundreds of years, they often did not perfect their sparks. In fact, they damaged them. Therefore, the Creator reducedthe number of sparks given to each person all at once.

We are not given 80, 100, or 120 years of life. We are given 29,200 days, 36,500 days, or 43,800 days, and within each one, we are meant to perfect a spark of Light. The spark we are meant to perfect today cannot be perfected tomorrow, just as the spark we could have perfected yesterday cannot be perfected today. Each day has its own unique work relating to a specific aspect of soul that needs purification and elevation.

The Kabbalists teach that at the end of every day, as we go to sleep, if we have perfected our spark, it is sent up into our spiritual bank where it remains to protect us and to give us Light and blessings. When a person succeeds in this work, often the Creator will give him even more sparks, which, of course, equals more days, months, and years of life.

The most important understanding from all this is that we do not live weeks, months, and years; we live day by day. The work we have to accomplish today cannot be accomplished tomorrow.

Awaken within your consciousness an appreciation for the power and tremendous gift of every day. When you internalize this understanding, even if days do not start off the way you had hoped, you will not write them off and push things into tomorrow. You will realize that what you need to accomplish today you can only accomplish today, and know that as you are perfecting and sending up the sparks, you are not only creating an amazing bank of Light that flows down to you, but you are also earning more days and more sparks to perfect.